Opinions

A half a world away from each other one small ecological threat and one very large environmental disaster are playing out. Both have something in common – the actions of humans.

First, let’s look at the local threat to the environment and our quality of life. A recent study of Norway, Games and Andrew lakes, in northwest Kandiyohi County finds that the three popular lakes are reaching a “tipping point” on water quality. Norway Lake is already considered “impaired” because of pollutants.

Sticking to your principles is easy when they are challenged by situations where people can easily see the reasons for your actions and agree with them. Such situations don’t test the depths of your convictions.

It is in those rare cases where standing by your principles has the crowd turn against you that you are tested. Often, in those cases, your sympathies lie with the crowd, but you still know what is right and necessary despite the anguish you feel in taking a firm stance. As a profession and organization, Minnesota newspapers faced such a test last week.

When you drive through the countryside these days you see an increasing number of solar farms popping up on the landscape – acres and acres of land covered with panels collecting power from the sun and feeding it into the electric grid. You will also see a growing number of businesses, from farm operations to big city manufacturing plants, with solar panels supplementing their power.

Wind farms have also been steadily growing in Minnesota and America, feeding power in to the electric grid. The University of Minnesota-Morris helps to power its campus with two giant windmills. A growing number of farmers have been using windmills to supplement their power.

We are at a difficult juncture in the future of rural Minnesota. Who will be the future generations that fill the jobs in our factories and small businesses? Who will fill our classrooms? Who will sit next to us in church? Who will buy the groceries, hardware goods, drug prescriptions, home decorative items, and other things that keep the doors open in our retail community?

Who will keep our hospital open, both through being the patients and the medical providers?

With CNH moving out of the north end of the Civic Center in October, Benson Public Schools have an opportunity to provide its sports programs with new facilities that serve not only students, but also the community at large.

Over the past several years, the school board has looked at multiple options to expand the gymnasium space it has with little success. Voters have rejected plans that would have seen new facilities constructed and show little appetite at this time for approving the construction of new buildings.

That is an awful lot of money for a small town to be looking at for investing in economic development. We don’t have it yet, but the odds are looking better that it might be coming our way.

While the Legislature passed the bill including the language that provides the city with four payments between 2018 and 2021 totaling $20 million, and Gov. Mark Dayton signed it, the Minnesota Pubic Utilities (PUC) still has to weigh in.

“If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”
Supreme Court Associate Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1929)

It isn’t easy to listen to the ideas of those with whom we vigorously disagree. In fact, these days we tend to shelter ourselves in the houses of thought where we are sure to hear opinions that reinforce what we already believe and hold dear.

In rural America every young person who can be filling a job vacancy at a local business is considered a valuable asset. Businesses advertise far and wide seeking workers. They conduct job fairs hoping to draw in new employees. But even in western Minnesota hundreds of jobs go unfilled because employers can’t find the people to fill them.

It is hard enough to get young people to move to rural Minnesota, leaving the big cities where there is a lot more action and other young people to socialize with, to fill job vacancies. Who knew that a growing challenge for employers would be that potential employees are being stolen away by video games?

Too often these days the ridiculous is partnered with the thoughtful in debates with both given equal footing. It’s called a false equivalency. It is giving equal time and credence to a person who says the Earth is flat as to one who shows you the proof that the Earth, is in fact, round.

Creating false equivalencies, giving listeners or readers the idea that two points of view always have equal weight and value, is done out of a warped sense of “fairness” and certainly not out of any devotion to intellectual honesty.

When we were very young the family would regularly go to the “family cottage” up on Lake Minnewaska during the summers. It was a small cottage on the south side of the lake sitting high on the hill that had been built in 1924 and was shared by the Johnson family relatives – our dad’s mother was a Johnson.

Each weekend when we would arrive at the lake we would have to run down to a mosquito-infested ravine to get several pails of water. It ran from a pipe that had been driven into the side of the ravine wall and had a steady flow of clear, cold water running from it. We would use that water to prime the hand pump in the cottage so that we would have running water for the weekend. There was an outhouse there in those early days as well.